Winning hearts and minds

and rethinking normality.

I live in North London, on a small but pleasant estate.

I think it’s important to build a sense of community wherever you are, and this is one of the few places in London I’ve been where it feels like the neighbours are still friends, or at least could be - a fading human tradition as people retreat indoors and behind glowing screens.

The street has its quaint characters and characteristics. In the spring, the geese from the nearby wetlands flood the road with dozens of goslings. They brazenly approach residents foolish enough to rustle their bags of snacks. They snatch sandwiches from people picnicing on the river. They leave their mess all over the street.

Personally, I love it. I think it’s fabulous that cars are forced to sit and wait while geese amble out of the way in their own time. I think it’s great that we share our space with nature. The proximity to Walthamstow Wetlands means we see sparrowhawks circling above us. Starlings and long-tailed tits and parakeets bound between rooftops. It’s a marvellous place to live and I’d wager not many, if any, streets close to central London experience the same thing.

Of course, as is the way with communities of humans living together, not everybody agrees. Some residents cannot stand the mess the geese make. Numerous times each year a resident will complain about it until the estate gardeners hose down the street, only for the geese to mess everywhere immediately the next day.

During No Mow May, when the gardeners stopped mowing the grass to encourage wildflowers to grow, complaints were raised that the estate looked ‘messy’ and ‘unpleasant’. It looked like this.

Even one of the directors of the residents’ association, charged with looking after the estate, recently raised a concern that the trees and hedges were ‘overgrown’ and needed to be cut back to ‘stop birds nesting’. This request was spurred by the financial damage they are perceived to cause to the buildings when they make their homes in the soffits - something I believe they have had to do because of a shortage of appropriate natural nesting habitats.

Here are some trees considered to be ‘overgrown’ at the moment.

Don’t get me wrong, pollarding trees in the right conditions can promote sustainable growth and beats chopping them down completely. But when our experience of the outdoors is only through highly managed woodland, we lose sight of what a natural process is. Our vision of healthy trees is skewed towards one of tight human control.

Much of this stems from the central issue at the heart of all of human society: disconnection from nature. The perception that nature is an ‘other’ - something that belongs in the countryside, or on specialist reserves, the domain of birdwatchers and bug enthusiasts and not of the everyday people immersed in the ‘real life’ of spending eight hours in an office before driving home to watch reality TV all night. ‘I’m all for nature,’ they say, ‘I just don’t want it in my back yard.’ It’s the prehistoric mentality of fencing our caves to keep out mountain lions so we don’t get eaten. The outdoors is wild and scary, and has no place in proper society.

Of course, the reality is that homo sapiens are as part of the ecosystem as everything else, but the abandoment of this mindset produces a culture in which it is normal to replace our grass with plastic, replace our hedges with fences, spray the bushes with pesticides and cut down trees because they are ‘blocking the light’. Nature vanishes from our world and we respond with a shrug, if we notice at all.

The same isn’t for everyone, of course. Countless people are flying the flag for nature, building habitats in their own gardens and maintaining trees. The gardeners on our street have suggested building a wildflower meadow and a pollinator garden beside the canal, acutely aware of the plight of the butterfly and the bumblebee.

In 1993, when the estate was first developed, the plans included turning the entire far end of the street into a car park. A concerned resident overlooking the site wrote to the developers about how the end of the street was a pretty meeting point for waterbirds, a place for people to picnic, and requested they ‘reconsider sacrificing this little area to the Great God Car.’ The developers agreed and left it as a green patch where geese and people sunbathe in the summer to this day.

The proximity of this street to the canal, the nearby wetlands, and the abundance of wildlife is precisely why we chose to call it home. But for those who believe a neighbourhood should be free of greenery - or at least its greenery should be finely trimmed and exist purely for aesthetics - the idea that the grass should be left uncut once in a while is unthinkable sacrilege. To them, suggesting that maybe a patch of heather or a pile of deadwood or a birch tree or a nesting box might be a nice addition to the garden is like suggesting they convert to an entirely different religion.

In truth, I don’t know how to change mentality. It’s why I started writing Urban Nature Diary - to try and remind people of the importance of nature connection, and perhaps imagine a world where ‘normal’ human habitation includes an abundance of trees, wildlife, ponds and native wildflower meadows in every garden.

The key for me in all of this is balance. It’s of course impractical to expect people to put up with a hornets’ nest in their front room, or squirrels chewing through electricity cables. But with no allowance for nature at all, the scales have tipped dangerously far the other way.

Reconnecting with nature at home is the gateway to further action. Rethinking how we live - even in a small way - opens the doors to wider conversations about how we eat, how we work, how we consume. Top-down decisions on nationwide management and international regulation can make sweeping changes, but they will only come when pressured by those who understand what’s at stake, clamouring for a better way of life.

A way of life with thriving soils, plants, insects and birds, even in the heart of our towns and cities.